Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Announcing The Unicode® Standard, Version 8.0

Version 8.0 of the Unicode Standard is now available. It includes
41 new emoji characters (including five modifiers for diversity), 5,771 new
ideographs for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, the new Georgian lari currency
symbol, and 86 lowercase Cherokee syllables. It also adds letters to existing
scripts to support Arwi (the Tamil language written in the Arabic script), the
Ik language in Uganda, Kulango in the Côte d’Ivoire, and other languages of
Africa. In total, this version adds 7,716 new characters and six new scripts.

The first version of Unicode Technical Report #51, Unicode Emoji is being released at the same time. That document describes the new emoji
characters. It provides design guidelines and data for improving emoji
interoperability across platforms, gives background information about emoji
symbols, and describes how they are selected for inclusion in the Unicode
Standard. The data is used to support emoji characters in implementations,
specifying which symbols are commonly displayed as emoji, how the new skin-tone
modifiers work, and how composite emoji can be formed with joiners. The Unicode
website now supplies charts
of emoji characters, showing vendor variations and providing other useful
information.

Phones and computers often need operating system updates to
support new emoji, which may take some time. It is also now clear which existing
characters, such as the often requested SHOPPING BAGS, can be used as emoji.
Once phones and computers support these characters, people will be able to see
colorful images such as the BOTTLE WITH POPPING CORK above.

Three other important Unicode specifications are updated for
Version 8.0:

Some of the changes in Version 8.0 and associated Unicode technical
standards may require modifications in implementations. For more information,
see Unicode 8.0
Migration and the migration sections of UTS #10, UTS #39, and UTS #46. For
full details on Version 8.0, see Unicode 8.0.